If our obsession with simulation has taught us anything, it’s that good old-fashioned mimicry is a cause of and a cause perpetuating its own existence. The simulacrum, whether it be a faithful reproduction of Saint Paul’s Catherdral made out of kippers or a waxwork scale model of Elvis Presley testicles, exudes a joy that extends well beyond the original, making it more vital, more meaningful, more entertaining and more authentic than had previously been thought possible. We don’t care that the Bootleg Beatles never went Hamburg and never claimed to be bigger than Jesus, we only care that they shake their heads, play their Rickenbacker guitars and avoid the ignominy of getting shot or growing old and bland like Mr McCartney. Likewise, we are able to tolerate the contractual diva excesses of Amy Winehouse, as long as the daft old soak is able to pull-off a passable Billie Holliday on occasion and that they digitally graft onto the mix, the sound of a needle whirring on vinyl. It seems everyone is going retro. We got through the eighties and the nineties only to discover that all the technology that we had amassed in the recording studio was essentially shit at capturing music. We had done the artistic equivalent of handing a set of power-tools to Thomas Chippendale. Even the most insensible lay person will know that it’s suffering that makes good art: the tragic flaw, one’s limitations, the joy of hacking one’s ear off with a spoon and mailing it to your estranged lover. And there are probably few who understand this better than three, greasy teenagers from London’s Kentish Town called Kitty, Daisy and Lewis.
Kitty, Daisy and Lewis do fifties music, in fifties clothing, using fifties instruments and recording techniques, which leaves them wide-open, you might speculate, to appealing to no one outside of the over-fifties. And this wouldn’t be far off correct.
Whilst it’s easy to be impressed by the trio’s prodigious handling of their upright basses, their harmonicas, their trombones and ukuleles, there’s a fundamental pointlessness about it all. The tracks – all covers with the exception of the frisky and quietly screwball ‘Swinging Hawaii’ – faithfully reproduce the boogie-woogie integrity of the acts they clearly respect (Muddy Waters, Charlie Rich and Nina Simone) but without adding anything of their own. It’s someone else’s Mojo they are raising, someone else’s storm. Applause must go to the band’s skiffly, loose-ball treatment of Canned Heat’s, ‘Going Up The Country’ but elsewhere too much attention gets paid to verisimilitude, which is a shame as there is patently more to this trio than Poodle-skirts and Dansettes. Winehouse’s real achievement was that she rifled through the archives with one foot in the Midtown Bar and Grill of the 1950s Atlantic City and one foot kicking against the door of the Camden Monarch, tearing off her IPod. Here, on the otherhand, there is no such tasty anachronism.
A bit like Jools Holland, but with less crack and more crackle.